4 and 5, had been a bit startled at first at seeing, soon after
dawn, shadowy forms rising slowly from the black depths of the valley,
hovering uncertainly along the edge of the _mesa_ until they could
make out the lone figure of the morning watcher, then slowly,
cautiously, and with gestures of amity and suppliance, drawing
gradually nearer. Sturdy Germans and mercurial Celts were, at the
start, disposed to "shoo" away these specters as being hostile, or at
least incongruous. But officers and men were soon made to see it was
to hear the morning music these children of the desert flocked so
early. The agency lay but twenty miles distant. The reservation lines
came no nearer; but the fame of the invader's big maple tom-tom (we
wore still the deep, resonant drum of Bunker Hill and Waterloo, of
Jemappes, Saratoga, and Chapultepec, not the modern rattle pan
borrowed from Prussia), and the trill of his magical pipe had spread
abroad throughout Apache land to the end that no higher reward for
good behavior could be given by the agent to his swarthy charges than
the begged-for _papel_ permitting them, in lumps of twenty, to trudge
through the evening shades to the outskirts of the soldier castle on
the _mesa_, there to wait the long night through until the soft
tinting of the eastward heavens and the twitter of the birdlings in
the willows along the stream, gave them courage to begin their timid
approach.
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